Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Thought-Piece for Saturday

It's not hard to figure out who gave this speech; it may be a bit more challenging to determine who wrote it. But it's just as true now as it was then. An excerpt:

...For the
object of the Communists is to reduce human nature to the material
elements alone. And the object of thinking Americans and their allies is
to preserve and strengthen the spiritual elements of human nature. The
material conception of man and the spiritual conception of man cannot be
reconciled. For this reason I have said that only through victory will
we secure ourselves. More than a century ago, Abraham Lincoln declared
that this nation cannot endure half free and half slave. Today that
solemn fact is true of the world.

Between Communists and men who
believe in a transcendent order there can be no enduring compromise; for
Communists will not tolerate religious belief, unless they find it so
weakened and tamed that it seems harmless; and men who discern natural
rights will never be able to live under Communism. This eternal
hostility was expressed far better than / can put it by a brilliant and
God-fearing American for whom I have great personal admiration, a man
who lies buried here in the chapel at Notre Dame: Orestes Brownson. Only
a few months after the Communist Manifesto was published, Brownson--who
had been a radical in his youth--denounced as heresy the philosophy of
Marx and the sociologist ideology in general.

Brownson saw at the
outset that Marxism was a political substitute for religion,
caricaturing Christian doctrine. And Brownson knew that the terrible
power of this ideology could be resisted only by true religious
understanding--and by willingness to sacrifice for the enduring things.
With a gift almost prophetic, Orestes Brownson declared that the
struggle of the future would be between Socialism and Christianity. In
1962, the fate of humankind is in the balance, and this contest seems to
draw toward judgment.

The competition between the Communists and
what we call the "Free World" is clearly not being decided by
living-standards or even by the big battalions. The issue will be
determined by power of conviction: the conviction of men who fear and
love God, or the conviction of materialists who detest anything higher
than themselves. And if our faith and our culture are to prevail, we
must tale our stand forthrightly on certain moral truths and ancient
ways.